Gun Control

Randy Barnett over at Volokh asks the question that is going to be fought out in state supreme courts across the land from here on out: what regulations are legitimate and what ones aren't?

SO WHAT GUN REGULATIONS ARE REASONABLE? Perhaps the question most commonly asked by reporters about yesterday's decision in Heller, is how it will affect the constitutionality of other gun laws. I believe Justice Scalia signaled that regulations short of a ban should be scrutinized the way we do "time, place, and manner" regulations of speech when he equated the Second Amendment with the First: "There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms. Of course the right was not unlimited, just as the First Amendment’s right of free speech was not."

One thing is sure - I think Heller is going to give us a chance to answer some lingering empirical questions related to the effects of gun control laws on crime. Heller is going to force changes in state-level gun control laws, liberalizing them in favor of more guns, and we'll treat that change as exogenous since it's driven by SCOTUS and not state-level unobservable variables. Maybe it will help settle some controversial findings from the 1990s.